Story: A pair of magical girls called Reflectors, Ruka and Hiori, fight to protect other girls from a group of predatory Reflectors that try to steal their Fragments (analogous to a person's emotions or soul, they become emotionally dead and zombie like, and later fall into a coma without it). The story takes some wild turns (which I won't spoil) building off that premise, and ends up in a radically different place than where it starts. It's certainly never boring, though occasionally it gets a bit too convoluted or abstract to follow exactly what's happening. Tone wise, it's squarely in the camp of "dark mahou shoujo", though it isn't excessive about it. It deals with some very heavy issues though, including child abuse, abandonment, suicide, self-harm and teenage prostitution. Listing all those off in a row makes it sound more depressing than it actually is though. The series doesn't wallow in despair or revel in the suffering of its characters. It's actually a pretty positive series overall, even a bit corny.
Audio/Visual: This show has a phenomenal OST, it adds so much to the series. Battles feel more epic, tragic moments hit harder, and moments of triumph give you chills. It is everything you would want from a soundtrack. The VA work is solid but not notable for the most part.
Then, we have the elephant in the room. Frankly speaking, this show looks awful. It isn't even the often-lampooned character designs, those simply have a shoujo manga look that's different than what you'd expect but not bad in and of itself. The animation is absolutely atrocious though. Characters are frequently off model, have eyes pointing in different directions, and have some of the most poorly drawn hands you'll ever see in anime. Aside from the battle scenes, which actually have some cool effects at times, and the nice, unique looking backgrounds of the Leap Range and the Common, there is almost nothing positive you can say about the series visually. It's a major letdown that a series this good was failed by its animation so horrendously
Characters: This series has excellent character writing and a wide variety of interesting characters with unique personalities. Ruka's character progression is very well done in particular, as she goes from a shy girl with no friends to a crucial voice of reason and motivator of the group. Hiori's initially generic "genki girl" attitude is also memorably subverted during the second cour. The side characters are complex and each have their own roles to play, and no one is extraneous. With so many things stacked against this series (the low budget, video game adaptation, etc...) it's kind of a miracle that it ended up being good, and the excellent characters are the main reason for that.
As a final note, this series has a lot of content warnings associated with it, as mentioned above, but there is a particularly extreme sequence of child abuse in episode 22 that most viewers will probably find troubling, especially those that are sensitive to that issue.
